As an experiment I upped the hydration of the SFBI recipe I use from 68% to 76%. I was interested to see how much difference there was in the crumb – wetter dough is supposed to make a more open crumb.<\/p>\n
The extra hydration made the dough very difficult to work with – it seemed almost as wet as ciabatta dough. I used my Tartine starter, fed the night before. After mixing the ingredients in the morning I let it rise 2\u00bd hours before dividing and shaping. It was almost impossible to pre-shape into a boule. After a 45 minute rest, I shaped the dough in to a boule by folding it rather than my usual method of gathering the dough up around the bottom to stretch the top. I then let them rise for another four hours in round bannetons.<\/p>\n
It was difficult to judge whether I over-proofed or not. The dough was very lax when I flipped them from the bannetons onto the peal to put them in the oven, but I couldn’t tell whether that was from over-proofing or just because of the high hydration.<\/p>\n
The end result did have a nice open crumb, but not significantly better than with the normal hydration. It didn’t get the oven pop I was hoping for, either.<\/p>\n
I’m going to abandon this direction of exploration and assume the original recipe is well optimized already.<\/p>\n\n\t\t